Gareth Kay posted recently on the calculation that showed that the electricity use of a Second Life avatar is similar to the amount consumed by the average Brazilian.
Something which gets overlooked is screensavers. Even eco organisations like Greenpeace and ClimateCrisis (the Inconvenient truth website) offer beautiful screensavers to download. But they shouldnt. According to this report on an Australian bank taking screensavers off 31,000 computers and telling their staff to put them to sleep instead; it potentially cuts a computer's total energy use in half.
Another intriguing idea that's been kicking around from a green blogger is moving to black web pages for sites like Google. This doesnt make any difference in LCD, but on the old CRT screens it does generate big savings link to original post via treehugger.
Do check out the new Negroponte one laptop one child PC pictured above which uses zero power (the 2 watts it does use - compared with 25 for a standard laptop - are generated by a crank, or I believe in the latest model a footpump and I think stored in a battery). read more here MIT link
If we are to be a sustainable and yet richly networked world we need plenty more where these came from. Do post further good green computing stories I have missed out in the comments (NB I didnt mention Greenpeace/Green Apple because I have gone on about that a lot and Steve Jobs has announced they are putting it right)
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